Native Population almost wholly descended
from Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity, and later Islam,
not Arab in origin

In Palestine the "small" number of Arab invaders
who had been imported by the Arabian conquerors were wiped out by disease.
Thus the "myth" of the "Palestinian Arab" descending "from the Arab conquerors"
appears to be factually incorrect for all but perhaps a few. Supporting
Hogarth, Hitti, and Lewis, the Reverend Parkes found that

During the first century after
the Arab conquest the caliph and governors of Syria and The Land [Palestine]
ruled almost entirely over Christian and Jewish subjects. Apart from the
bedouin [nomads], in the earliest days the only Arabs west of the Jordan
(not all of whom were themselves Muslims) were the garnisons... "

They "were small," and were "decimated" by
epidemics within two years after the capture of Jerusalem. After a law,
prohibiting the Arabs from owning land there, had been rescinded, "rich
Arabs" came into ownership of "a good deal of the country."[83]

"But this change of owners" -- often
through the dispossession of Christian owners -- "did not involve any extensive
change in the nature of the population." Jews and Christians still worked
the land, because the Arabs had neither the desire nor the experience
for agricultural toil; they "heartily despised" both the toil and "the
tiller" [84]

In fact, during the brief time of actual
Arab rule -- the Omayyad from Damascus -- that rule was military only.

The clerical or theological view
favoring a providential interpretation of Islamic expansion, corresponding
to the Old Testament interpretation of the Hebrew history and to the medieval
philosophy of Christian history,
has a faulty philological basis...

Not until the second and third centuries
of the Moslem era did the bulk of the people in Syria, Mesopotamia and
Persia profess the religion of Muhammad. Between the military
conquest of these regions and their religious conversion a long period
intervened. And when they were converted the people turned primarily
because of setf-interest -- to escape tribute and seek identification with
the ruling class.[85]

Islam and the Arabic language were disseminated
by a multi-ethnic Muslim community that at first included "numbers of Arabians
in the provinces," but by by the tenth century onwards," yet another "new
ruling race, the Turks" joined the seemingly endless parade of conquest
-- a kind of periodic rape of the Holy Land.

"From the tenth century" a multi-ethnic
native population, which perhaps still included some few descendants of
the Arabian invaders -- all together under the rule of the Turks -- commingled,
and the possibility of singling out the Arabs as a people became unworkable;
Arabic-speaking people would be a more accurate term. Already in the tenth
century "the word Arab reverts to its earlier meaning of Bedouin or nomad,
becoming in effect a social rather than an ethnic term."[86]

With the Crusaders' slaughters -- including
mass murder in 1099 of all the 70,000 Muslims in Jerusalem -- the deterioration
of the land in Palestine acelerated.

... Massacres and the fear of
massacre had greatly reduced the number of Jews in Palestine and Christians
in Syria.[87]

The "vast majority" remaining in Palestine
was "native Christians," of "mixed origin ... carelessly known as Christian
Arabs."[88]

Because the population was "decimated"
by the endemic massacres, disease, famine, and wars, one Muslim ruler "brought
in Turks and Negroes." Another "had Berbers, Slavs, Greeks and Dailamites."
The Kurdish conqueror,[89] "Saladin, introduced more Turks, and some Kurds."[90]

"The flower of the Saracenes who fought
the Crusaders were Turks," chronicled Philip Graves.[91] "The Mamluks brought
armies of Georgians, and Circasians. For his personal security each monarch
relied on his own purchase."[92] "In the Palestinian towns Greek was the
common tongue..." [93] In 1296, 18,000 'tents" -- families -- of Tartars
entered and settled in the land of Palestine. [94]

Thus, not only was Arab rule "extraordinarily
short," but the "pure Arab peoples in Palestine for millennia" -- a romanticized
notion discredited by serious scholars -- actually consisted of a non-Arabian,
multi-ethnic procession of immirants.

In the fourteenth century, the identity
was specifically a religious one. According to Bernard Lewis,

The majority belonged to ... the
community or nation of Islam. Its members thought of themselves primarily
as Muslims. When further classification was necessary, it might be territorial
-- Egyptians, Syrian, Iraqi -- or social-townsman, peasant, nomad. It is
to this last that the term Arab belongs. So little had it retained of
its ethnic meaning that we even find it applied at times to non-Arab nomads
of Kurdish or Turkoman extraction. [96]

This page was produced by Joseph
E. KatzMiddle Eastern Political and Religious
History Analyst Brooklyn, New York E-mail
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